Priority #1: Improving performance...

[myztkl-kev]

I'm using an AMD8350 4.2 - 4.4ghz, since disabling the C6 state, in the BIOS, my game feels smoother.

I wouldn't want my 4770k running full boar at all times, C-state is the only thing that makes me comfortable overclocking. though i will test this.

[Gupster]

Yeah it is not optimized at all, it makes me laugh how a person can come into this thread saying its all working great and we should not expect better performance, what a load of baloney

[Gupster]

I overclocked my i5 750 Lynn field the other day from stock speed of 2.7GHZ up to 4GHZ and it made no difference to my FPS at all, and i am using an Nvidea Gainward Phantom GTX 570 1024 gfx card/8GB ram/ Win 7 64 bit. I tested the 2 CPU speeds in exactly the same places in the game and that was with patch 1.19.

[Gupster]

I'm using an AMD8350 4.2 - 4.4ghz, since disabling the C6 state, in the BIOS, my game feels smoother.

I wouldn't want my 4770k running full boar at all times, C-state is the only thing that makes me comfortable overclocking. though i will test this.

Likewise, i don't want my CPU running @full speed all the time but i will also test turning off C6 state in the bios.

[santaranger]

none of the bios cpu features have made any positive difference for me.
haven't tried overclocking yet. maybe I will try, since i have watercooling anyway...

[Shootist]

I think they capped the game at 4 threads on purpose, mostly for simplicity's sake, and considering how bad the game was released with, I'm ok with 4. It has the capability of 4 times the throughput of x3tc, let them max that out first.

I assume you're talking about Rebirth? 32 threads, not 4.

[Gupster]

I tried running the game with both C6 and C1E/2 etc support disabled in the bios so my CPU was running at max with or without the game running but sadly my FPS and game performance where not affected at all, i appreciate the suggestion to try this though.

[BigBANGtheory]

Ooh, sick burn. But a man who can not understand the inherent value of eye candy never will.

The numerous background calculations have nothing to do with visual performance. Rebirth can give excellent frame rates in barren sectors, with the universe happily chugging away (contrast this to X3, where lag and low framerates still exist in the deep void). The problems exist with stuff that is happening on screen, in proximity to the player.

Thats not entirely true though, the CPU could quite possibly be locked at 30fps in a game like this so the CPU gets more time simulating the background processes.

Until there is an APU with heterogeneous machine code that can smartly dispatch the right instruction to the right processor, the CPU performance can always cap the GPU if the CPU is in heavy use.

But its not though, the CPU on a high end PC is not being fully utilised it barely hits 50% tests have shown this. The rendering thread seems to get caught in a wait state possibly waiting on other processes and threads to complete.

Xrebirth.exe (on my PC at least) spawns around 30 threads in its stack, but usually only 4 of those are consuming a reasonable amount of CPU time.

[Pannonian]

I guess, my 8Core AMD makes no difference in this game. I could be playing this with a Pentium 4 dual core and still have the same performance?

[myztkl-kev]

I guess, my 8Core AMD makes no difference in this game. I could be playing this with a Pentium 4 dual core and still have the same performance?

I wouldn't go that far, but it seems lower end PC's have better luck than we do.

[santaranger]

Here are my results from overclocking.
I did some less systematic tests now.
There are areas which are heavily GPU limited and those which are heavuily CPU limited.

I've had a space scene (mostly asteroids/nebula) where my GPU load was 100% on minimum details, and I could reduce my CPU clock to 1.6 GHz without any performance impact (hence GPU limited). The fps meter stayed at ~25.

On platforms on the other hand, my fps increase almost linearly with my CPU clock, while my GPU is at 60-70%. The further I set the CPU clock, the higher the GPU load gets of course.
Not sure why platforms are so CPU intensive, though. Maybe there's another engine at work? It feels like a different game to me. Maybe they outsourced it like Ubisoft did boss fights on DXHR

Interestingly, the CPU usage graphs do not seem to change, no matter what frequencies I set, i.e. even @1.6GHz the monitors show <50% total and ~60-70% max per core, the numbers are virtually identical to the ones @4.4GHz.

The majority of the game situations are still CPU limited for me (on lowest settings), with 30-40 fps in space at best, when I do serious overclocking.
Patch 1.19 seems to have improved performance somewhat, but I can't tell objectively (don't have the 1.18 save anymore).
Multi-core optimization has still a long way to go, I want to see at least my first 4 cores at 100% load.

[santaranger]

OK I found out my core loads are rather normal, as the (4) threads are constantly being swapped between all cores, which results in the maximum apparent 60-70% core load.
I guess the only way is increasing the number of threads.

Edit: I just found out there are not 4 but only TWO threads that seem to do the bulk of the foreground work:
[ external image ]
The 2nd one (#660) has much less CPU usage when on platforms. The 3rd one (XRebirth.exe...) is the most active when the game is in the background.

I begin to understand why things are so bad.

[Sace]

Yeah it is not optimized at all, it makes me laugh how a person can come into this thread saying its all working great and we should not expect better performance, what a load of baloney

And who wrote that? Please stop trolling and try to comprehend what I wrote instead.

[xandicar]

Ooh, sick burn. But a man who can not understand the inherent value of eye candy never will.

The numerous background calculations have nothing to do with visual performance. Rebirth can give excellent frame rates in barren sectors, with the universe happily chugging away (contrast this to X3, where lag and low framerates still exist in the deep void). The problems exist with stuff that is happening on screen, in proximity to the player.

I noticed that too. The more happens closely the less performance I have. It get worse if I do stations scanning in a dense station area. Then a drop in on screen performance is significant. So I stopped doing that in dense station area's.

[BigBANGtheory]

I posted this in the Public Beta forum, but is also relevant to this discussion.

Look how the CPU threads shift from kernel-mode and good performance in Open Space but then disappears when you cross into a Zone and take a 50% or more performance hit:

[ external image ]

So its NOT the case that your CPU and GPU is working harder in a Zone when it is needed, they actually work less effectively and you seem to suffer an FPS penalty as a result.

Is that normal or expected?

That was taken using an AMD R9 290x, if someone with say an Nvidia 780 could do the same I'd be interested in seeing the results.

[Gupster]

Yeah it is not optimized at all, it makes me laugh how a person can come into this thread saying its all working great and we should not expect better performance, what a load of baloney

And who wrote that? Please stop trolling and try to comprehend what I wrote instead.

You wrote that sace but i see that you deleted the post, nice try mister but i know what you said, in your deleted post you also implied that i and others here where stupid to think that i/we should expect 60FPS and that it "made you laugh" that people should make other game comparison benchmarks to this game, you also told me that "I am acting like i know every piece of code in this game" when all i originally said in this thread was that i expected more performance from this game and that it was badly optimized.

Only troll here is you mister.

Anyway, back on topic, the game need optimizing badly and in several recent interviews with Bernd they admit the game is poorly optimised and they are working on it now, so hopefully i will be be able to play the game with decent performance soon.

[Sace]

You wrote that sace but i see that you deleted the post, nice try mister but i know what you said, in your deleted post you also implied that i and others here where stupid to think that i/we should expect 60FPS and that it "made you laugh that people should expect 60FPS from this game, you also told me that "I am acting like i know every piece of code in this game"

Only troll here and a dishonest one at that is you mister.

Anyway, back on topic, the game need optimizing badly and in several recent interviews with Bernd they admit the game is poorly optimised and they are working on it now, so hopefully i will be be able to play the game with decent performance soon.

Yeah, right. I deleted posts. Another evidence that you didn't understand a single word I wrote so far...

I never implied that you are stupid, I merely said that you and ESPECIALLY you shouldn't expect 'above 60FPS with no FPS drop whatsoever'. Why? Because your CPU is close to low-end at best. Your i5-760 is even slower than my i7-860 from 2009 and even that CPU was only mediocre when I got it. On top of that, Bernd stated that Rebirth is heavily CPU-dependent, especially for pathing calculations when you're near many ships. In fact it seemed to weigh heavy enough that they already had to compromise (ships flying through stations) to make it playable. Pathing is one of those things that don't apply when you're in outer space (OOS-simplification would be my guess) or deserted zones. This is just one example, another would be that changing graphic settings barely makes a difference. And again: I am quite sure that the game isn't optimized enough but expecting 60+ FPS without drops at all times is way over the top for you.

I am content with my 30FPS for now and therefore suggest that they fix gameplay first. As soon as that's fixed, they can continue optimizing for high-end machines. (IMHO)

[jl1aisbett]

You wrote that sace but i see that you deleted the post, nice try mister but i know what you said, in your deleted post you also implied that i and others here where stupid to think that i/we should expect 60FPS and that it "made you laugh that people should expect 60FPS from this game, you also told me that "I am acting like i know every piece of code in this game"

Only troll here and a dishonest one at that is you mister.

As a neutral party here can I just rephrase both sides of this discussion.

You are both agreeing that the game needs optimising and does have performance problems. Neither of you are actually saying the game is fine as is or that performance doesn't need improving, Sace just said it's fine for him and he'd rather see game breaking bugs fixed first.

The only main point you are actually disagreeing on is you think the game should run at 60fps minimum and Sace doesn't think there's evidence the target minimum should necessarily be quite that high. He/She is not however saying that what it is now is acceptable.


On a more general performance note I have been upgrading my computer recently, not for Rebirth specifically but I have been doing before and after comparisons in rebirth just as a test.

I upgraded my graphics card from a GeForce GTX 570 to GeForce GTX 780 Ti, in that case I noticed the minimum FPS in the worse sectors didn't actually improve at all but the maximum did. I was also able to massively increase my graphics settings with no performance cost either including maxing the settings in the graphics driver (like 32x CSAA). In my case the game appears CPU bound. It's looks really nice now though.

I have a motherboard, CPU, RAM upgrade on the way that should be here in a day or 2 so I'll do a before and after with that as well just in case anyone is interested.

My current performance is a minimum of about 17 fps, mainly in albion. I have vsync on so I don't know the true maximum but it hits 60 at times.

My specs now:

Gigabyte EX58-Extreme Motherboard
Intel Core i7 920 CPU @ 2.67Ghz
6Gb DDR3 667Mhz RAM - Triple channel
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked
Standard SATA hard drives (non SSD) running at 3Gb/s
Using HDMI Audio via graphics card

What my specs will be once the hardware arrives:

Asus RAMPAGE IV Black Edition Motherboard
Intel Core I7 4930K CPU @ 3.4Ghz (don't plan to overclock)
32Gb DDR3 2133Mhz RAM (G.Skill) - Quad Channel
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked
Standard SATA hard drives (non SSD) running at 6Gb/s
Using HDMI Audio via graphics card (probably)

[Gupster]

You wrote that sace but i see that you deleted the post, nice try mister but i know what you said, in your deleted post you also implied that i and others here where stupid to think that i/we should expect 60FPS and that it "made you laugh that people should expect 60FPS from this game, you also told me that "I am acting like i know every piece of code in this game"

Only troll here and a dishonest one at that is you mister.

Anyway, back on topic, the game need optimizing badly and in several recent interviews with Bernd they admit the game is poorly optimised and they are working on it now, so hopefully i will be be able to play the game with decent performance soon.

Yeah, right. I deleted posts. Another evidence that you didn't understand a single word I wrote so far...

I never implied that you are stupid, I merely said that you and ESPECIALLY you shouldn't expect 'above 60FPS with no FPS drop whatsoever'. Why? Because your CPU is close to low-end at best. Your i5-760 is even slower than my i7-860 from 2009 and even that CPU was only mediocre when I got it. On top of that, Bernd stated that Rebirth is heavily CPU-dependent, especially for pathing calculations when you're near many ships. In fact it seemed to weigh heavy enough that they already had to compromise (ships flying through stations) to make it playable. Pathing is one of those things that don't apply when you're in outer space (OOS-simplification would be my guess) or deserted zones. This is just one example, another would be that changing graphic settings barely makes a difference. And again: I am quite sure that the game isn't optimized enough but expecting 60+ FPS without drops at all times is way over the top for you.

I am content with my 30FPS for now and therefore suggest that they fix gameplay first. As soon as that's fixed, they can continue optimizing for high-end machines. (IMHO)

If you read properly my PC specs which i have posted twice in this thread you will see that i said i have an Intel Core i5 750 Lynn field @ a stock speed of 2.7GHZ NOT an "Intel 760" and that i ran a test to see if running the CPU at a higher speed i.e overclocked to 4GHZ made any performance difference to my game which it did not.

An Intel Core i5 750 Lynnfield @stock speed of 2.67GHZ is easily overclocked to 4GHZ.

The 30 FPS on your machine is laughably low as it is for many people here posting monster PC specs, however, having said that, if you are happy with 30FPS or a bit above that on your rig then i am pleased for you.

Another thing that you seem to not realize is that my PC specs are a bit above the "Recommended" specs posted by Ego-soft, and NOT the "Minimum specs"

[Gupster]

You wrote that sace but i see that you deleted the post, nice try mister but i know what you said, in your deleted post you also implied that i and others here where stupid to think that i/we should expect 60FPS and that it "made you laugh that people should expect 60FPS from this game, you also told me that "I am acting like i know every piece of code in this game"

Only troll here and a dishonest one at that is you mister.

As a neutral party here can I just rephrase both sides of this discussion.

You are both agreeing that the game needs optimising and does have performance problems. Neither of you are actually saying the game is fine as is or that performance doesn't need improving, Sace just said it's fine for him and he'd rather see game breaking bugs fixed first.

The only main point you are actually disagreeing on is you think the game should run at 60fps minimum and Sace doesn't think there's evidence the target minimum should necessarily be quite that high. He/She is not however saying that what it is now is acceptable.


On a more general performance note I have been upgrading my computer recently, not for Rebirth specifically but I have been doing before and after comparisons in rebirth just as a test.

I upgraded my graphics card from a GeForce GTX 570 to GeForce GTX 780 Ti, in that case I noticed the minimum FPS in the worse sectors didn't actually improve at all but the maximum did. I was also able to massively increase my graphics settings with no performance cost either including maxing the settings in the graphics driver (like 32x CSAA). In my case the game appears CPU bound. It's looks really nice now though.

I have a motherboard, CPU, RAM upgrade on the way that should be here in a day or 2 so I'll do a before and after with that as well just in case anyone is interested.

My current performance is a minimum of about 17 fps, mainly in albion. I have vsync on so I don't know the true maximum but it hits 60 at times.

My specs now:

Gigabyte EX58-Extreme Motherboard
Intel Core i7 920 CPU @ 2.67Ghz
6Gb DDR3 667Mhz RAM - Triple channel
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked
Standard SATA hard drives (non SSD) running at 3Gb/s
Using HDMI Audio via graphics card

What my specs will be once the hardware arrives:

Asus RAMPAGE IV Black Edition Motherboard
Intel Core I7 4930K CPU @ 3.4Ghz (don't plan to overclock)
32Gb DDR3 2133Mhz RAM (G.Skill) - Quad Channel
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked
Standard SATA hard drives (non SSD) running at 6Gb/s
Using HDMI Audio via graphics card (probably)

Thank you for your post, i agree that we are both saying that the game needs optimizing, as an example, in Devries i get nearly 90 FPS but like you if i go into the starting area as an example i get 30FPS, and going into tunnels the game can stutter to 5 FPS then to 20FPS, and overclocking the CPU to 4GHZ had no effect on these FPS numbers.